ASSETS under Jester Media Services Group (JMS) continue to register phenomenal success despite the country’s current challenging operating environment.
This comes as the latest results of the independent Zimbabwe All Media Products Survey (ZAMPS) show that 3Ktv, the Daily News, and The Financial Gazette remain well ahead of their local industry peers. Not for the first time, ZAMPS once again attested to the fact that Zimbabwe’s most influential daily, the Daily News, is the only daily newspaper that is growing in the country.
This latest local media research study, whose results were released in Harare yesterday, covered the period July to December 2022. During this period, the inimitable Daily News impressively grew its share of local daily readership from 24 percent to 26 percent, at a time that competing offerings are not enjoying the best of times.
For comparative purposes, NewsDay’s readership share, for example, fell from 23 percent to 18 percent during the same period. At the same time, the Daily News registered an even more impressive jump in its e-paper readership, which grew 69 percent — markedly outperforming its direct competitors in this key area.
The country’s number one business publication, The Financial Gazette, also remained well ahead of its few rivals during this reporting period, while 3Ktv was once again confirmed as the most watched Zimbabwean channel on satellite.
3Ktv broadcasts on both DStv Channel 293 and the digital terrestrial platform, where authorities are slowly starting to roll out the required set top boxes. 3Ktv was licensed in November 2020, after coming tops in a competitive and public bidding process.
It went on to become the first licensed private commercial station to operate in the country in February last year since television was first introduced in the then Southern Rhodesia in November 1960. Commenting on the continued phenomenal growth of JMS’s products, Group Editor-in-Chief Guthrie Munyuki thanked the multi-media company’s valued audiences, key business partners and dedicated staff.
“Just over three decades ago, JMS was a small and relatively unknown magazine publisher. I was there in its infancy. It’s almost unbelievable that today we are a fast-growing, diversified media group which is now a force to reckon with in the market.
“Indeed, we now operate some of the country’s biggest, most important and most successful media brands. And we still have even bigger ambitions. “The significant investment in 3Ktv last year signalled JMS’s plans to continue growing and to create Zimbabwe’s largest and most commercially sustainable media conglomerate by the end of this decade.
“As our Group CEO, Pilate Machadu, said earlier this year, our success is founded on believing when others are doubting, planning when others are fooling around, deciding while others are delaying, beginning while others are procrastinating, working while others are wishing and complaining, investing when others are wasting and persisting when others are quitting. May this long continue,” Munyuki said.
ZAMPS is a continuous local media study that is commissioned by the Zimbabwe Advertising Research Foundation (ZARF). It gathers data on the consumption and usage of different media platforms and commercially-produced products for use by advertisers and other interested parties.